Regulated industries are required by law to maintain records regarding batch manufacturing processes. For example, detailed records are kept for pharmaceutical and food batch manufacturing processes to comply with legal regulations and to maintain a desired level of quality assurance. In some cases, every event that occurs over the course of a batch process may be recorded. Typical records associated with batch processes may include information relating to material usage, material yield, resource usage, quality results, process parameters, actions performed on batches, and so on.
Conventionally, batch processes are monitored by floor operators. Depending on what is being manufactured, some batch processes may run for days or weeks. Floor operators typically collect required information by writing data onto paper forms. Manual data collection for long processes may be expensive and susceptible to data entry error. Furthermore, a result of manual data collection is that data is sorted chronologically. This may make searching for specific events or information difficult and time consuming. An alternative option is to enter data recorded on the paper forms into an electronic database object manually so the data is more accessible. However, data entry is also expensive and time consuming. In either case, a manual process is used to collect the data. Manual processes are prone to error, and in some cases errors in data recording can be expensive.